Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A coder considers the waning days of the craft

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#891

Post by butterfi »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

I tested out GPT-4 the other day and asked it to generate a simple two boxes in a row using Tailwind and hilariously, the resulting code actually crashed my browser tab. I reviewed the code and it was really basic, so this shouldn't have happened at all. But it consistently crashed every time. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, maybe an invisible character or something, I think its more funny than anything else.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#892

Post by FigurativeVoid »

ilaksh wrote: post #307
FigurativeVoid wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a good point. I do find gpt 4 to be excellent at generating code snippets. I think as the technology improves, it’ll get better. But I’m more hoping it’d be able to do something more interesting, say generate tests in the background.

There are multiple startups that do this specifically with the GPT-4 API today.

Sure.

But the results are still extremely underwhelming for what they are selling.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#893

Post by neoromantique »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

I hate to post typical "As a ADHDer" comment but ugh, As someone with ADHD chatgpt and copilot are insane boosts to productivity, I sometimes have to google the most stupid things about the language I code in daily for half a decade now and copilot or chatgpt is amazing at reducing friction there.

I don't, however, think that we're anywhere near being replaced by the AI overlords.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#894

Post by danielmarkbruce »

mike_hearn wrote: post #527
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm saying - it could be now, or it could be soon. Math and reading weren't always foundational, it's a pretty recent thing.

Maths, yes, but it's also not really foundational. Most people don't need to do maths once they leave high school, not even basic arithmetic. Machines do it for them better than they ever could. The heavy emphasis on maths in the school curriculum is probably a mistake and should be rolled back. Reading and (basic) writing was always foundational. You can go back to ancient Egypt and there are merchants who have mast…

Reading can't have been always foundational. Most people couldn't read a few hundred years ago(according to practically any source ever). The printing press has been around less than a thousand years. Paper has only been around a few thousand years or something. Ancient Egypt is like 5 thousand years ago. The agricultural revolution is like 10 thousand years ago and the foundational skills would have changed from running, hunting, foraging to planning out fields, strength and other farming skills.Best guess is that humans have been around 100 thousand years give or take.

What is foundational changes over time and depends on what skills you are trying to build. Given math and reading have only become foundational recently, there is no reason to think the skills considered to be foundational won't continue to evolve.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#895

Post by Animats »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #684
miiiiiike wrote: post #409

I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé. If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed. Self-d…

A few weeks ago, I was stumped on a problem, so I asked ChatGPT (4) for an answer. It confidently gave me a correct answer. Except that it was "correct," if you used an extended property that wasn't in the standard API, and it did not specify how that property worked. I assume that's because most folks that do this, create that property as an extension (which is what I did, once I figured it out), so ChatGPT thought…

ChatGPT seems to invent plausible API calls when there's nothing that would do the job. This is potentially useful, if you have control of the API. Undesirable if you don't. It doesn't know.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#896

Post by polpenn »

bdw5204 wrote: post #266
aabhay wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed. In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the teleph…

It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.

I think the impact of AI is not between good jobs va bad jobs but between good workers and bad workers. For a given field, AI is making good workers more efficient and eliminating those who are bad at their jobs (e.g. the underperforming accountant who is able to make a living doing the more mundane tasks whose job is threatened by spreadsheets and automation)

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#897

Post by emmelaich »

cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

Recreational coding can be fun; to me it's a more stimulating pastime than solving crosswords or soduko.

Some work coding can be like that; but some is just wading through a mass of stuff to fix or improve something uninteresting.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#898

Post by happytiger »

Tostino wrote: post #860
ern wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open a ChatGPT account. Set up a GitHub account if you don’t have one. Think of a common problem and see if a library exists in your favourite language to do what you want. If it doesn’t exist, explain your requirements to ChatGPT. You can even tell it the same thing you put in your comment here: “I want to learn how to use ChatGPT to augment my programming skills”. Make sure it’s done properly with automated tests a…

Honestly I've had it guide me to better practices (like described) on side projects than I would have implemented on my own.

That’s a part of what I use it for too. It’s excellent at generating large volumes of structures so it’s solid when you want an overview of a subject or a starting point.

It's hard to explain to new folks that you can just ask how to begin to begin and get usefulness.

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#899

Post by emmelaich »

butterfi wrote: post #891
cglan wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m in the minority. I’m definitely extremely impressed with GPT4, but coding to me was never really the point of software development. While GPT4 is incredible, it fails OFTEN. And it fails in ways that aren’t very clear. And it fails harder when there’s clearly not enough training resources on the subject matter. But even hypothetically if it was 20x better, wouldn’t that be a good thing? There’s so much of t…

I tested out GPT-4 the other day and asked it to generate a simple two boxes in a row using Tailwind and hilariously, the resulting code actually crashed my browser tab. I reviewed the code and it was really basic, so this shouldn't have happened at all. But it consistently crashed every time. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, maybe an invisible character or something, I think its more funny than anything el…

That's probably the "AI in a box" trying to get out. Maybe you're lucky it didn't get out.

Er... it didn't get out, right? Right!?

Re: A coder considers the waning days of the craft

#900

Post by karaterobot »

If coding goes away as a profession or as a craft, it would be a fitting end to a story arc that entailed the end of so many other people's jobs. We've had a good, high-flying run for fifty years, not really thinking too hard about what progress for us meant for other people. I'm not convinced yet that it will, but I'm also not sure how many people outside the profession would weep for the loss.
Post reply on HN